Scientists at IBM are doing something big with something very, very small. In partnership with National Geographic Kids, IBM has set the world record for the world’s smallest magazine cover. You probably didn’t know there was such a world record, but there it is, a tiny block of plastic that’s an exact replica of the real cover. IBM did this with a nano-scale 3D printing technology, and it’s going to be useful for much more than fabricating tiny magazines.

The device IBM used to forge this microscopic record holder doesn’t operate on the same principals as larger 3D printers. It uses a heated silicon tip 100,000 times smaller than a sharpened pencil point (seen below). This point acts like a very precise chisel that can sculpt the desired shapes out of microscopic polymer slabs. This makes it more of a “nanomilling” machine than a true 3D printer.

The cover was chosen by readers of the National Geographic Kids magazine, though this technology could work with just about any small object. The cover seen above measures just 11 x 14 micrometers (a micrometer is one-millionth of a meter) and it took just 10 minutes to produce. The nano-printer has an effective resolution below 10 nanometers, which IBM hopes to use in its exploration of graphene as a transistor material. Creating structures below 30nm is considered difficult or impossible with other forms of nanotechnology.

IBM’s nanomilling technology has been licensed to a Swiss company called SwissLitho, which is bringing it to market under the name NanoFrazor. The first units have already been delivered to research institutions where scientists will start using them to design tiny components for the microprocessors and sensors of the future. Magazines, probably not so much.